​Today I present the book description for a new self-published volume, unread by me, that bills itself as the first in a ten-volume (!) collection of the alleged journals of Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, the medieval Norse-Scottish prince who gained fame when a German from a Scottish expatriate family identified him as the fictitious Prince Zichmni from the sixteenth century hoax Zeno manuscript, and Richard Henry Major argued that the name was a corruption of “Sinclair” due to bad handwriting. Despite the many problems with the narrative—not least, in reality one of its main characters was in Greece in 1392 and on trial in Venice in 1394 before dying in 1402 while the narrative has him journeying to Greenland in 1393 and dying in 1394—the story has become a touchstone for the alternative history community. Since the late 1800s, a grab-bag of Scottish nationalists, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and Templar fetishists have raised Henry Sinclair to a demigod (literally—Frederick Pohl declared him the Micmac demigod Glooscap) and imagine him as the founder of a fabulous colony in the Americas a century before Columbus. 

​Recently, former television personality Scott Wolter appeared on the Earth Ancients radio show to discuss the Knights Templar in North America, and the interview started off about as badly as possible when the host, Cliff Dunning, asked Wolter to describe the “earliest” European arrival in the New World, which established that our host is basically trolling for white pride. This becomes clearer when Dunning returns to the question at the end and rephrases “European” into “pre-Native,” suggesting that he sees the first Americans as white. To his credit, Wolter redirected the question to Native American oral traditions, though these are rather fantastical claims about Native American “world elders” who claim to meet with representatives from every continent in the world every eight years, and have for tens of thousands of years. I need not note that there is no evidence of global confabs in Ice Age America—where communication across the continent was already a challenge, let alone globally—but perhaps it is an imaginary version of the more recent “World Elders Forum” of the past few years that brings together indigenous leaders from around the world.

​Dear God, there’s another one. It’s only been a couple of days since I reviewed Xaviant Haze’s Ancient Giants, and now we have an even worse entry in the canon of ancient mysteries books to contend with. This one is especially appropriate because it comes to us from the pen of Frank Joseph, formerly known as Frank Collin, the ex-head of the National Socialist White People’s Party and the National Socialist Party of America. In a month when a former American Nazi Party leader is running unopposed to secure the Republican nomination for an Illinois congressional seat (which he will likely lose since it is a heavily Democratic district), it just seems right to see what the other former Nazi leader in the public eye is up to. Yes, he is still promoting white interests, just more subtly. 

​If you made a world-changing discovery that could prove that all of history was wrong, how would you present it to the world? Would you hold a news conference to outline the evidence? Publish a journal article for peer review with all of the data needed to understand the claim? Or would you create a nine-minute CGI video that you then ambiguously market to a “global Templar audience” as a strange hybrid of fact and fiction “based on a true story”? Obviously, you’d do the last of these because if you believe that you have completely rewritten history, chances are pretty good that you don’t know enough about evidence and logic and reason to know why you are wrong.

​In October of last year, A+E Networks filed a trademark application asking for priority consideration for their use of the clunky name Buried: Knights Templar and the Holy Grail for a new television series. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office moved with exceptional speed to grant A+E the use of the name, which they slapped on a program that began airing last week on the History channel as part of the network’s massive push to spread Templar-themed content across its television properties. This included the Knightfall drama series about the Templars, and a refocusing of Curse of Oak Island on fictitious Templar mysteries. All of this is part of what the channel’s head of programming described last year as an intentional push for Templar programming because of audience demand for it

​As we approach the New Year, it’s time to take a final look back at 2017 in fringe history. This was a year when political news overshadowed almost everything else, but 2017 still managed to find new ways to use and abuse history, rivalling the historic low of 2016. This year in fringe history might not have been more extreme than last year, but it was certainly darker. It was the year when fringe historians rejoiced that they had an ally in the White House whose courtiers proudly flew the banner of “alternative facts,” but more than anything, it was the year of Tom DeLonge, the musician turned ufologist who published an ancient astronaut book, launched a UFO research company, was crowned UFO researcher of the year, and took credit for the year’s biggest UFO research flap. Let’s look back at what happened over the past twelve months.

​Last night the History channel debuted its new series about the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, Knightfall, a series designed to capitalize on the momentum generated by the network’s hit series Vikings and its core audience’s fascination with Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories. While critics offered mixed reviews of the series, many complained that the show was either dramatically inert or overly generic. Nevertheless, it is the first entry to build on Vikings to create a multipronged programming strategy designed to turn History into a full-service entertainment destination, where scripted shows provide an entry point for documentary features on the (quasi-) real history behind the story.